The Pianist's Hands

by Eugenio Fuentes

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

As in so many cities in the heat of growth, Breda, Spain, is home to a modest construction company that wants to take advantage of the booming times to construct a luxury housing-complex in the suburbs. Although between the business partners there are differences of opinion and fears about such an ambitious project, the expectation of the sumptuous benefits push them to go through with the scheme. Then suddenly one day, the corpse of one of the partners appears inside one of the newly constructed buildings. Detective Ricardo Cupido delves into a passionate investigation where the alibis matter less than the dark and desolate description of the human condition.

Release date: June 30, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 289

Sample

I’ve heard that silly remark, that pianists have delicate hands, more often than any other. But it’s a lie. In pictures, and several times on TV, I’ve seen the great Marguerite Vajda at play, and I’ve also seen her flailing her arms during a long interview as she explained a point. Even when the rest of her body looked relaxed, her hands were tense and alert, like a dog that seems to be asleep but suddenly catches a fly hovering in front of its jaws. The shape of her fingers was not delicate at all. On the contrary, they were like little truncheons getting wider at the tip. Strong fingers, ugly like stumps, but capable of firing up the air with the beauty of a chord.


On CD covers I’ve seen other pianists’ hands as well – Maria João Pires’s, Barenboim’s, Esteban Sánchez’s, Pollini’s, Perahia’s, Glenn Gould’s – and all of them look as wide as rackets, stringed with veins that vibrate as the blood courses through them. Not one of them is a beautiful hand, as though there were a secret affinity between sublime music and the deformity of the body part that performs it. All of those fingers seem to be growing out of the rings which strangle their bases, getting fatter and fatter every year. I once had a teacher whose wedding ring cut into his finger so badly that it had to be prised off by a blacksmith.

Above all, I know my hands. I’ve seen them in motion and at rest, flat and making a fist, ready to caress and to do harm; I know how they bleed and the pattern of their veins; I know the lines on my palms (life line: very short; heart line: split into five) and the scar that a knife wound left in my thumb; I know their small marks and moles, the down on their backs, their angular and hardened joints. My hands are a pianist’s hands too. And yet I’ve scattered small corpses all over the city with them.

But I don’t mean to run ahead of the story. I’ve always been a tidy, methodical man. I act with a discipline that surely comes from all those years studying music, when I still had faith in my talent and not a day went by without my sitting at the piano for several hours.

Back then, I was sure that I, too, would become an accomplished pianist, that I would succeed in the profession, performing concerts in beautiful distant cities all around the world as a soloist or prominent member in an orchestra. I dreamt of going on stage at the Vienna Opera House, at the Scala or the Metropolitan, striding towards the grand piano in that swift step with which great performers convey their impatience, almost scorning the public who later applaud them. My mother encouraged this self-confidence, but everyone knows how short-sighted mothers can be about their children’s modest gifts. Any sparkle dazzles them, and they mistake skill for talent, ease for genius.


My parents died and I never completed my studies. So I’m no virtuoso, far from it. I ply a trade that I hate from the bottom of my heart: I am a keyboard player. The job title causes me great frustration: it describes someone who uses a disreputable instrument, like a little electric organ with a goat tied to it, and plays in the street for a few coins raining from balconies or, in my case, plays it in an orchestra of mediocre amateur musicians that people hire for weddings, municipal festivities in godforsaken towns, and popular parties in sad suburban neighbourhoods. That’s what I’ve amounted to. Keyboard player. A night trade that leaves me free to sleep all day and think about stuff.


I’ve always thought it was excessive leisure that drove me to plying my other trade.

One morning, a friend of my then wife called me to ask a favour. Her dog, a Cocker Spaniel, had given birth to five puppies fathered by a stray mongrel without an owner. She’d tried to give them away but no one would take them. She desperately wanted to get rid of them, but didn’t feel up to taking them to the vet to be put down; even less did she dare to kill them herself. And so she asked me, as I had some free time, to take them to the vet: she couldn’t even look them in the eyes. She gave me a large amount of money to pay for the task and for my trouble. But the puppies never made it to the clinic. They didn’t have a sweet death, if what they are injected with makes them die sweetly. They stopped breathing at the bottom of the Lebrón, in a sack weighed down by stones.

Now, some time later, I know about ungratefulness and understand the loneliness of executioners. The king’s contempt for his hangmen is in direct proportion to how much he needs their services. I know now, but I didn’t then, and I was slow to understand the scorn that my wife’s friend showed me once the job was done, as if it hadn’t been she who had asked me to do it.


I don’t know how, but the news of that commission must have got around and, a few days later, another woman phoned to ask me for a favour as well – the second one. It is nearly always women who call me, as if they are more fearful – or more compassionate towards suffering, even if sometimes they can be more hateful – than men, who seem to establish a colder and more neutral relationship with animals.

‘You don’t know me,’ she said, and I chose not to ask her how she knew me. ‘I was given your phone number, and they told me that you… that you take care of animals.’

‘What have you got in mind?’ I asked, though I knew I shouldn’t.

‘Hamsters. My son. It’s just the two of us here, and I don’t know how to solve the problem. A few months ago, he begged me to get him a pair of hamsters for his birthday. Some of his friends have got them too.’

‘Aha.’

‘Well, he doesn’t want them now. He’s actually come to hate them, for no apparent reason, and I don’t know what to do with the creatures.’

‘Can’t you give them away, or return them to the store?’

‘The thing is,’ she hesitated, ‘he must have done something to them. It’s not easy to catch them now. They’re hiding in some cranny in the house, afraid and quite feral. They’ve started stealing food and gnawing at the curtains. I wouldn’t want to come across them one night in the dark, or to tread on them. As I said, it’s not easy to catch them. When I tried, they faced up to me, baring needle-sharp teeth and squealing like rats, their eyes red with rage. One can get quite scared of them. I mean,’ she corrected herself, ‘someone who’s not a specialist. That’s why I’m calling you. Would you be able to come round and take them away?’

‘I think I would.’

‘Just name a time and tell me how much you’d charge.’

I asked for an amount that was excessive for getting rid of a pair of harmless mice. She thought it was reasonable.


After this second commission, I began to see the economic prospects opening up before me. Suddenly, I realised that a lot of the people I knew had some kind of pet at home. The city where I lived, though planned for human inhabitants, was crawling with a diverse fauna: cats, dogs, goldfish, tortoises, rabbits, hamsters, moles, rats, monkeys, frogs, bats, silkworms and birds of all shapes and sizes. Above all, the canine population was so high that there was a veterinarian clinic in practically every neighbourhood. I was astonished to find that, between them, these clinics also boasted a hairdressing service, a crèche, kennels, psychological attention, euthanasia, and even something that one might call a brothel. Breda was full of animals that were being better looked after than millions of children!


I was not surprised when they called me a third time. The voice on the phone was an old woman’s, and she wouldn’t tell me what it was about until I came to her house. She had to see me.

It was one of those old flats with higher-than-average ceilings, plaster ceiling roses, and thick walls that muffle up noises. But going in was like penetrating into a rainforest; deep into the vernal gaiety of well-fed birds of all colours. Bits of music filled every room, from the whistling of the goldfinch and the tambourine-like cackle of the parrot, through the hiss of the pardal and the flute-like noises of the golden oriole, to the silly peep of the blackbird and the clanging of the tit. On reaching the living room, I saw a parakeet looking at us from the top of a lamp, out of the old woman’s reach, completely uninterested in the freedom that the open window offered him.


‘My husband died three days ago. This is all he’s left me: his birds. And you can’t imagine how much dirt such small animals can produce,’ she whispered pointing out birdseed everywhere, droppings in every corner, even feathers floating in the air.


‘A lot?’

‘A whole life of cleaning up their muck. There’s no animal filthier than a bird. Maybe it’s because they live up in the trees, so they’re not affected by the state of the ground,’ she said. ‘But I put up with them long enough when he was alive to have to put up with them now. My whole life they’ve been driving me crazy with their songs. I want you to take them all away. All of them. Would you be able to?’


‘Of course.’

‘I don’t care what you do with them, so long as you don’t let them loose. Some might come back. I don’t care if they have to suffer either. I don’t care if they suffer,’ she repeated, and I got the feeling that it wasn’t just the birds that she was thinking about.

That was my third job. From that point onwards, I remember them less clearly. Of course, some left more of an imprint than others: some were quite laborious, one or two caused pain. Dogs bit me as they refused to die, shrinking back, with their legs and tails tucked in, showing a spiky tongue in the end; perfumed cats with bristling fur and curved claws fiercely scratched the wicker travelling cages in which they undertook their last journeys to the bottom of the river; birds’ tiny skulls were crushed with a blow. There was a monkey with God knows what dangerous disease who had to disappear without a trace because he’d been illegally imported from Africa. His gaze as he lay fully conscious of the fact that he was dying troubled me for some time: his silent look of reproach seemed to be telling me that he was no less sensitive and human than all those highly gifted gorillas, all those megalomaniac mammals called men, who, without any remorse, had become butchers of other species. There was also a poodle owned by a woman who stipulated in her will that it should be buried with her. Even if I didn’t understand that kind of possessive obsession – characteristic of people who can’t countenance that a creature which has loved them might love somebody else – I obeyed and did it; obeyed and got paid. There were, indeed, many animals whose owners, for one reason or another, didn’t take them to the vet. I always made sure that their agony, if not sweet, was at least brief.


I can almost say that being recognised as a competent – but I don’t know what to call it: animal killer sounds too serious, pet carer is a euphemism – as a competent agent, let’s say, eased the burden of being a failed pianist. At home in the afternoons, I still sat in front of the Petrof and I think that in those days I played better than ever. I did it for pleasure; I had nothing to prove or to gain, but Schubert’s delicate lieder and Bach’s variations reached a musicality and resonance of feeling that I had never attained before.


On a given day, within the space of a few hours, my hands might alternate between the soft touch of the artist and the cold-heartedness of the executioner, but I’m certain that this had no psychological effect on me; I was not schizophrenic, or mentally imbalanced.

My troubles started when my wife refused to see it all as harmless, in view of the increasing number of commissions to take care of animals that had suddenly become a nuisance: in homes where a baby had come, or where the person who looked after them had died, or in others, still, where their owners got bored or simply left on holiday. A few times, I saw her looking at my hands in disgust. A few times, she took away from me a piece of bread that I was cutting, or the lettuce hearts I was washing, as though I might contaminate anything I touched with death and violence. She stopped holding my hand as we walked together in the street and a few times she moved her thighs and sex away as I tried to caress them.

And so it wasn’t long before loneliness arrived. One Saturday morning, she picked up her things and went back to her parents’ home, which she had left fifteen years earlier to marry a guy who, she believed, had a lot of potential as a musician, but who, without knowing quite how, had become an executioner of animals and a vulgar keyboard player in a cheap entertainment orchestra at weddings and parties. How I hate that word ‘entertainment’ as well; that word which advertises our services as if our acts were not dull, repetitive and mediocre, fake in their cheerfulness – the bars simplified at the slightest difficulty of execution, a muddle of chords!


The worst thing is that I see no way out of my second line of work. You see, I’ve become the ideal man, someone who is indifferent enough to carry it out swiftly and efficiently: if you are finely attuned to your own suffering you have no time for the sufferings of animals. Zoological pain is nothing compared to your own personal pain.

This afternoon, I have nothing to do. I sit down at the piano, waiting for the night to come, hoping that it will not be too troubling. I sink my hands into the depths of the ivory and the notes start pouring forth. Tomorrow, I’ll go and see a woman who wants me to wring the necks of the pigeons that soil the balcony of her flat.





The maquette of the new urban development was devoid of trees, like a prison. It still smelled of paint and took up an enormous drawing board placed on trestles, two metres by four in size. In it, one could already see the division of land into plots, the paved streets, and the network of water and gas pipes and TV and telephone cables. All of these were to be laid underground, partly to prevent breakages and accidents, but also to achieve a clean look, free from encumbrances: out-of-sight progress, the city of the future. Parks and communal spaces were also drawn up. The remaining half of the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand square metres was divided into plots of land which were destined to become buildings. The shape of these buildings was the reason why the three partners of Construcciones Paraíso were having a meeting.


To assist with the facts, calculate the figures of the various options and record agreements and disagreements, Alicia, the company’s quantity surveyor, was present as well; none of the partners wanted any of the administrative staff, who were less involved with the project, to hear what was going to be said in the room. Martín Ordiales knew there would be arguments and conflicts of interest that should remain strictly confidential. And he was sure that Alicia would maintain confidentiality.


Besides, he liked seeing her and having her around the office, because those were the only moments when she looked up to him. As soon as he drifted away from work matters, Alicia drifted away from him.

He was standing by the window, looking down at the square where children played watched by their mothers, when the door opened and Santiago Muriel walked in. Muriel was a small man with a bald head which was strangely dented, as if he had sustained an injury as a child. ‘The kind of person whose face you’d never touch,’ Alicia had once said. Unremarkable, dark-skinned, as if covered by a layer of ash, he was so normal that he was almost invisible. Sometimes, when Martín recalled a meeting or a visit to a building site, he struggled to remember whether or not Muriel had been present, for he blended in perfectly with the brown furniture or the grey cement of his surroundings. As a partner, he gave orders and took part in all decisions, but it was as if he never spoke. Martín had noticed that even the builders seemed to forget Muriel’s instructions after a few minutes and had to come back to consult him.


Nevertheless, he was indispensable for running the company. He kept the books with painstaking accuracy and visited the town council to ask for planning permission and licences, always in a polite and humble manner, but also never giving up until he obtained whatever the company needed. He carried figures and budgets in his head, costs of machinery and materials, lists of companies that might be subcontracted for a profit. He was careful about small sums – a quality which was hard to come by in someone who shared his property with two other partners. And he had proved honest enough that he seemed unlikely ever to succumb to temptation.

He was, indeed, an efficient manager. And yet, he was incapable of selling even a single property. His inability to sound convincing and his lack of charisma and persuasiveness were evident to prospective buyers, who usually stopped listening after the first minute.

He owned about twenty per cent of the company’s shares, which he had kept since he had started work under the late Gonzalo Paraíso. The portion seemed enough, and it had neither increased nor decreased in the thirty years the company had been in existence. His modest greed was directed not at the internal control of the company, but at the capital the company might gain in the outside world, and he was aware of how important his role was; now more than ever, what with the confrontation between Martín and Miranda, each of whom owned half of the remaining shares. The asymmetry made him the arbiter of their decisions: all he had to do to declare a victory or a defeat was to look left or right.


To Martín, the stand that Muriel would take at the meeting was a mystery. On the one hand, he knew that Muriel clung to the memory of the late Paraíso rather sentimentally – although he wondered whether or not that loyalty would extend to a daughter who, for years now, had acted a bit… well, rebelliously, and had shown no interest in the company except for asking about its overall profits. On the other hand, Muriel’s character and ideas – he was resistant to change and fearful of running risks – would surely predispose him to get behind Martín’s proposal. As a technician and manager, Muriel would be on his side; as a sentimentalist, on Miranda’s.


Muriel greeted him with a platitude and sat down immersing himself in some papers while Martín decided that he was not only unremarkable in looks, but also in his inability ever to say anything original. Muriel seemed to be taking shelter in the cellulose of the papers scribbled with figures and accounts, as though setting them against an even more abstract world of arguments, ideas and marketing plans which was completely alien to him. Poring over his papers was an excuse to avoid moments of conflict; he was an ageing man whose greatest pleasure was going over a difficult calculation and confirming that he had got it right, down to the last penny.


Martín knew Muriel’s wife and couldn’t help wondering to what extent she was to blame for his meekness and lack of get-up-and-go. Muriel couldn’t have been like this in the past: he’d taken the risk of setting up a modern company in a rural town whose population had barely adjusted to machinery that performed tasks previously done by hand, and who had carried on building their lodgings on load-bearing walls because the only physical laws they knew were the laws of the pulley and the lever, and this in a basic and intuitive manner. The wife – a big, chain-smoking woman, who adorned herself with large necklaces and dressed in garish clothes with ample sleeves that she was always trailing over ashtrays – dominated him completely, and must have wanted him only to provide the seed she needed to produce two daughters, whom she had brought up in her image and who treated him as appallingly as she did.


Martín didn’t need to turn round to know that Miranda Paraíso had come in. One way or another, she always made her presence felt and, indeed, he now heard her vigorous way of opening the door, and the firm and slightly mocking click of her heels. She was. . .